As Britain publishes its first 'national wellbeing indicators', OurKingdom wraps up our debate on happiness. Here, the editor of the debate looks back on the series of articles inspired by the growing interest in happiness shown by politicians, economists, statisticians and psychologists.

As Britain publishes its first 'national wellbeing indicators', OurKingdom wraps up our debate on happiness. Here, the editor of the debate looks back on the series of articles inspired by the growing interest in happiness shown by politicians, economists, statisticians and psychologists.

Last week, the Office for National
Statistics (ONS) announced
that it had identified ten indicators of national wellbeing,
following a lengthy public consultation on what people considered to
be important in valuing and measuring the quality of their lives. The
central finding appears to be that ‘individual satisfaction’,
that is, how satisfied people feel about their own lives, is the most
important indicator of wellbeing. This scores more highly than the
circumstantial elements in wellbeing (such as health and
relationships), which in turn score more highly than the structural
factors (such as the state of the economy or environment).

Could the consultation have turned out
otherwise? Might this new apparatus of valuation have thrown up the
result that the British public would like to prioritise ‘good
governance’ or ‘financial stability’, then work down from
there? I suspect not. There is a tautology at the heart of this
venture. Wellbeing research has a bias towards the psychological,
which elevates impressions and moods to the status of an over-arching
societal measure.

This is something that a number of
contributors to the OurKingdom
happiness debate have sharply criticised. Gerry
Hassan argued that “we are being sold a false premise of
liberation, freedom and expression by powerful forces which shape
modern life. Instead of seeing ourselves only as individuals, human
beings are naturally social and connected, who define themselves as
much collectively.” A related critique, as made by Pat
Kane and Chris
Groves, was that this focus upon individual states of being, was
distracting from the economic conditions that might cause unhappiness
in the first place, especially insecurity in the face of the future.

Somewhat more optimistically, I
wonderedwhether
happiness economics might ultimately return public attention towards
substantial questions of political economy, once it becomes clear how
much unhappiness is related to unemployment, insecurity and bad
workplace relations. I hoped that Geoff
Mulgan (one of the co-founders of Action
for Happiness) might be persuaded to agree with this point, in an
interview
with him for the happiness debate, though he was more keen to
focus on the empirical evidence as and when it develops.

There was a second cluster of themes
that emerged from the debate, which questioned how happiness was
being defined. Clearly there are multiple ways of defining and
measuring happiness, and one
of the risks is that the followers of Jeremy
Bentham in the economics profession have a worrying tendency to
reduce all forms of human experience to a single scale. On this,
Mulgan was happy to agree. Articles by Jules
Evans and Matt
Grist both argued, perhaps somewhat hopefully in view of last
week’s ONS announcement, that a more rounded, Aristotelian or
participatory view of happiness needed accounting for, in which
society, community or nation provides a sense of belonging and basis
for ‘the good life’. More starkly, Kate
Oakley offered a resolutely anti-utilitarian critique of the turn
to happiness in British arts policy.

It is difficult to imagine any
contributor to our debate arguing that ‘individual satisfaction’
is the most important component of national wellbeing. But that,
apparently, is the view of the British public. One could argue that
the consultation exercise was framed by particular economic and
statistical experts, in ways that invited such a response. Or perhaps
intellectuals and political thinkers have always been hostile to the
doyens of statistical measurement, the whole way back to the
Enlightenment. As editor of the debate, I found it difficult to find
contributors who might put the case for happiness economics or
measurement, although Carol
Graham’s contribution was a welcome and articulate exception in
this regard. But maybe we have to consider that the British public
has spoken, and declared that a person’s private, mental state
really is the most important thing in life.

This proposition seems a little, well,
worrying. Perhaps this agenda represents a form of neoliberalism 2.0,
in which the value relativism that Friedrich
Hayek praised in markets, is wedded to the psychologism of the
marketing industry, until every public or private institution, every
asset or relationship, every cost or benefit, is only evaluated in
terms of one single question: how does it make me feel? The
Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj
Zizek, argues that personal enjoyment has become a greater
obligation in the contemporary age than self-discipline, and brings
an even greater sense of failure when it is not achieved.
Perhaps ‘individual satisfaction’ is the last thing that should
be placed at the centre of a good, fulfilling life. Happiness, as
various philosophers have noticed, is often best achieved when we
least seek it.

But before we turn cynically away from
the ONS agenda, and the happiness movement more broadly, lets at
least remember how magically slippery terms such as ‘happiness’
(and, to a lesser extent, wellbeing) are. These are not terms that
experts or statisticians will ever be able to monopolise, as they do
with those all-important policy categories of ‘efficiency’,
‘health’ and ‘CO2’. Lets at least welcome the fact that here
is an emerging policy agenda, which everyone can contribute a
legitimate view on, as the ONS consultation has demonstrated, for
better or worse. That is not the value relativism of the market, but
a glimmer of the perspectival competition of democracy.

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